France at the heart of worldwide polar research

The programme agency you direct has just published a foresight study on French polar research. Why was this chosen as the agency's first deliverable?

Elsa Cortijo : In 2022, Olivier Poivre d'Arvor, France's ambassador for the poles and oceans, presented France's first polar strategy to President Emmanuel Macron. This document featured an estimated figure of €1 billion required as France's investment in the poles between now and 2030. This budget provided for 100 million euros to support research as well as specific infrastructure plans like building a new French Pacific-Antarctic semi-submersible vessel, the Michel Rocard, the reconstruction of the Dumont-d'Urville station on the Antarctic Peninsula scheduled to start in 2026 and the renovation of the Franco-Italian Concordia station.

Subsequently, at the One Planet Polar Summit in November 2023, Emmanuel Macron announced the launch of an East Antarctic research programme which the scientific community had been strongly calling for. Following on from this, a few months after the creation of the programme agencies in mid-2024, the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research asked us to work on a scientific polar foresight study, the research complement to the overall polar strategy. In practical terms, the aim of this foresight research is to translate the polar strategy's ambitions into tangible research guidelines centred on a coherent interdisciplinary programme geared towards international cooperation. 

For this first deliverable, the agency was the contracting authority and assigned the project to the CNRS's, Earth & Space Institute, working in association with all the agency's partners involved in polar research (the CEA, the Ifremer, the MNHN  and several universities). 10% of the CNRS's jointly supervised research units are involved in polar research and the organisation accounts for 70-80% of French publications on the poles. These figures make the CNRS the French research organisation with the most strengths in this field and also the organisation with the second most publications on the polar regions in the world.

What are the foresight study's main conclusions?

E. C.: The report published today at the Third United Nations Conference on the Oceans (UNOC-3) in Nice presents a structuring polar research programme developed by the national scientific community. It's an interdisciplinary programme covering the three polar regions – the Arctic, Antarctic and sub-Antarctic – and the whole polar socio-environmental system (see box below). This approach dovetails with strong international cooperation initiatives like the Decade of Action for Cryospheric Sciences (2025-2034) launched by Unesco, the international Antarctica InSync programme  (2027-2030) and the International Polar Year 2032-2033 in the longer term. This is a unique opportunity for France to make an essential contribution to international polar research efforts. In fact, as France is of course a non-polar nation, research remains our entry point to geopolitical discussions on these regions.

What are the agency's next projects after this first deliverable?

E. C.: Two other subjects are being launched currently. The first is being collectively dealt with by the 'Agralife' programme agency, led by the INRAE , and also the 'Health' programme agency, led by the Inserm , and concerns the One Health theme , particularly as there's an international summit to come soon. We have chosen to concentrate on two aspects of this vast subject – the crucial issue of data and the question of France's overseas territories which are on the front line of environmental change. The three programme agencies have asked the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (Anses) to steer the project.

The second subject is human intervention in the climate which people will perhaps know better as 'geoengineering'. Given the difficulty of drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions despite the efforts that have already been made – which of course need to be continued – like the idea of implementing specific technologies in this area is gaining support. These aim to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere, for example by increasing the oceans' rate of carbon absorption through the 'carbon dioxide removal' (CDR) strategy or to modify the planet's radiation balance  to prevent overheating by sending aerosols into the atmosphere in a process known as 'solar radiation modification' (SRM). CDR and SRM involve several technologies that are currently essentially immature, sometimes border on science fiction and would require an immense level of investment. Also, several of them may potentially be dangerous which concerns the scientific community and requires specific research.

There is much division between countries and among scientific communities on the issue of climate intervention. Some call for a moratorium while others are increasingly considering these technologies as ways of combating climate disruption, following the example set by the United Kingdom which just launched its first call for projects on SRM. These questions are also being raised within the IPCC, which is deliberating whether to include some of these technologies in work on its seventh report scheduled for publication by the end of the decade. This means our work supported, among others, by the Ministry for Ecological Transition, Biodiversity, Forestry, Sea and Fisheries, has a complex overall context and will aim to produce a national roadmap from a European perspective.

These two new subjects are at the interface of research and civil society issues and are core topics for our programme agency.